through the fifties and sixties HEINER ROTHFUCHS, 1913 – 2000, worked as an illustrator for many publishing houses in germany ( FISCHER, BERTELSMANN, KLETT and BROCKHAUS, to name a few ). he had learned house-painter and taught himself nature- and animal-drawing. from 1936 on he illustrated for youth-magazines and books. after WW2 he started teaching illustration with an emphasis on ‘scientific illustration and graphics’. all his life he was interested in the sciences of nature, ethnology and archeology and explored northern afrika on his travels. following a small selection of his illustration for the german KARL MAY book-series.

december 2009 I published the first post about THE HANGMAN. recently I found a print of the short in a decent quality and started to recreate some of the longer backgrounds. LES GOLDMAN and PAUL JULIAN produced the 11 min short in 1964, PAUL JULIAN painted all the backgrounds and character-stills of the film. as you will see in a series of upcoming posts, his paintings are true masterpieces. for UPA and the short THE TELLTALE HEART JULIAN developed a very unique style that he used in this film as well, a style that is influenced by EDWARD HOPPER ( 1882 – 1967 ) and BEN SHAHN ( 1898 – 1969 ).

ABOUT ME

my name is hans bacher, – I work as production designer in the animation film industry. for the last 40 years I lived and worked in duesseldorf, london, paris, los angeles, manila and tokyo. now I am professor for film-design at the nanyang techn. university in singapore.